


featherstep

by samalander



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Animal Death, Dancing, F/M, Gen, Harm to Animals, Magical Realism, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Talking to animals, b_c remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-26
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-02-06 06:41:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1848223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has always heard the voices of the animals around her, but when a bird tells her to trust the strange man pointing an arrow at her head, she does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	featherstep

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [طائر غريب (Strange Bird)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/764693) by [CloudAtlas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/pseuds/CloudAtlas). 



> I've loved Franzi's work for a long time, so I was super excited to get to work on her stuff for remix. It was hard to choose the story to work on, but on a walk one day, I started thinking about Natasha's affinity for languages, and what it might mean if she could communicate with Clint on another level. And it grew from there
> 
> With thanks to [enigma731](http://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731) for the beta and the encouragement, to [sansets](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sansets) for agreeing that it made sense, and [rubynye](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rubynye) for promising me it didn't suck.
> 
>  
> 
> **Please see the end note for specific warnings in re: animal injury.**

She grew up hearing their songs.

As a little girl, Natasha would lie in bed and listen to the mice, the rats who threatened to bite the sleepers in the Red Room. Others girls talked about their feet, the scratchy drag of sharp little toes across the concrete, but for Natasha, the songs were more striking.

There were other students—her sisters, they said—who had other problems-- there was Olga who could see colors no one else could name, and Masha who sometimes set men on fire when they touched her, but Natasha heard the voices of the rats and the mice, and sometimes she could talk back.

* * *

Her favorite noises, when she regained access to the world above, were the fireflies. They had a low hum, a kind of throbbing song-voice that spoke of nights unending, the quest for love. She understood fireflies, she thought, even as she spun the kind of webs that would ensnare them. Even when she was the Black Widow, the spider, her heart lay with the fireflies.

* * *

The night he finds her is quiet, and she is lying on a dock in Brazil, listening to the throb of the jungle, the dissonant voices of insects and birds and humans, all the words and sounds that she's known her whole life.

Her hands are caked in blood, hardened and flaking off of her skin into the water below. She killed a family today, set the orphanage alight and slit the throats of all the children who tried to escape. A cat watched her impartially, making snide comments about her technique, the way she killed without what it would call _finesse_.

It told her there were too many bodies, that she'd never eat all of them before they went bad.

She killed the cat with a well-placed dagger through its skull, a blow more real than any of the people who streamed out of the smoldering building.

She's ready to die tonight, she thinks. All the people she killed, and the cat who did nothing wrong. It’s time for someone to kill her.

The archer, the man who is slow and lithe in his movements, somehow birdlike in his grace, has been tracking her for months. He picked up her scent in Sao Paulo, when she burned the hospital, red embers against the night sky. She wonders if he would track her back to Russia, if he could stand the snow, or if he's as cold blooded as she is.

His footfalls are light, but she hears them all the same when he steps onto the dock, leveling his bow and drawing, preparing the arrow that will make a little hole at the top of her scalp, burrow into her brain.

She welcomes it. She embraces the silence.

He hesitates.

"Do it," she breathes, and she can hear his surprise, though he says nothing. "Kill me."

Still, he's waiting for something. Remorse? He won't find remorse here.

The bird that alights next to her is huge, a kind of eagle, she thinks. Maybe it will eat her eyes, maybe it will do the job her archer can't. Maybe it will free her from her cage, and maybe they will chain her to the dock and let it eat her liver for the rest of eternity as penance for the cat.

"Trust him," the eagle says, before leaning in and pinching a strand of her hair in its beak.

The archer gasps, the first sound he's made since he found her today.

Natasha sits up, then, and turns to look at him. The eagle takes flight and lands, quickly, on his bow, weighing down the heavy plastic alloy so that the arrow isn't pointed at her anymore.

"Friends," the eagle says, looking at both of them, and then takes off again, as if its job is done.

She looks up, meeting the eyes of the archer.

"Friends," he says, his voice low and scratchy, the same timbre as a firefly song.

"Trust you," she replies, and he nods, offering her his hand. She takes it, letting him pull her to her feet, ignoring the stickiness of her bloodied skin.

Her stomach is roiling, threatening to discharge its sparse contents, but his eyes are kind behind the killer’s glaze, and she is so very tired of running.

"Come with me," he orders, and she nods curtly, following him off the dock and into the jungle.

* * *

She hears the whispers almost as soon as she gets to SHIELD. People say Clint Barton was a hawk, that he was a bird before he was a person. They say that's why he won't use guns, that's why he kills with feathers. They also say Natasha is a monster, when they think she can’t hear them, and she's not sure they're wrong on any count.

She comes back to SHIELD with him, lets them fold her into their ranks like a good little soldier. She doesn't talk about the animals, how the birds outside the Helicarrier sing about how ugly it is, how the cockroaches don't even know they're in the air until they make the mistake of trying to leave, how she can hear them scream in terror as they fall, more vivid than any human voice.

Apparently Clint doesn't say anything about their feathered friend, because no one knows that she can hear these things.

A few days after they return from Brazil, she’s sitting at the desk in her tiny quarters, trying to fill out a form for Hill, trying to put some kind of history together. Her door slides open with a whisper and he appears with his eyes bagged and tired-looking.

"It was a harpy eagle," he says, by way of hello. "The one that spoke."

"Do a lot of birds speak to you?" she asks.

Clint nods, touching one of the pens she has on the table. "You?"

"All animals," she says. "Bugs, birds, everything. They all sing. All the time."

The man who can talk to birds considers that for a moment. "Sounds loud."

"Yes," she agrees.

* * *

Somehow, SHIELD gets convinced that Natasha actually wants to work for them, which is odd, because she doesn't remember ever _wanting_ a thing in her life.

"You'll be partnered with Barton," Hill tells her. Her voice is lupine, Natasha thinks, a shrewd wolf in her floating metal prison. "It's not a strict partnership. He has the order to kill you, if he needs to. If you give him a reason."

Natasha nods. That's just good sense.

* * *

Barton is a strange man, but she knew that. Sometimes, when they’re not too high up, she likes to sit with him on the edge of the Helicarrier, her back supported by whichever plane he's hiding behind, whichever bulkhead shields them from the wind. He lets his feet dangle off the side, in the whipping currents. Sometimes she wonders what would happen if he let himself fall, if he went plummeting over the edge with his arms outstretched, ready for a current to catch him and carry him home.

"They say you were a hawk," she says, her voice barely audible over the rushing of the wind. "That the first time you stepped onto a firing range you panicked and tried to destroy the place."

Clint calls out to a passing bird, entreating it for news, but sea birds are always too important to talk to humans.

"They say you were a hawk," she says again, watching his feet kick into nothingness. "That you're only a human now because of magic, or a curse."

He doesn't look at her.

"They say you were a hawk." She lets the words hover and swirl in the deepening eddy of silence between them.

"They say you're a spider," he counters, after a long moment. "They say you lure men to their deaths."

"Alkonost," she says. "Bird of the underworld who sings so sweetly no man ever wants anything more."

He raises an eyebrow, but she continues. "Sirin, whose song lures men to their deaths, who can only be seen by people who are happy."

Still, there is no response from the man who talks to birds.

"Gamayun, the prophetic bird of the east."

That gets his attention. "Gamayun," he says, rolling the word in his mouth. "That one feels right."

Natasha nods. Of course it does. The bird who lives at the gates of paradise, but never goes in.

* * *

"I wish I knew how to fly," she says, watching a wren play in the air above the forest.

"I used to," he says. "Closest thing now is dancing."

The forest is alive, loud. Places that most people would call quiet are deafening to Natasha, the screams and breaths of a thousand animals. She prefers the cities, the quiet purr of cars, who never want anything from her.

"Dancing I can do," she says, picking a blade of grass.

"Teach me?" he asks, pushing himself to his feet.

She takes his hand and lets him haul her up, her body pressed against his. A groundhog makes a lewd comment, and she steps back.

"No," she says. "Not here."

* * *

He wants to learn the foxtrot, he says, because it has the word fox in it. He likes foxes, the way they're sharp and dangerous.

She nods and shows him the Feather Step, which makes both of them laugh for days.

* * *

The world of Tony Stark is almost silent. No roaches or mice to sing their quiet tunes, only fish below the cliff, and Natasha has never much cared for fish. Nothing to talk about, really. Kelp.

Clint is in New Mexico, and he says the birds there are chatty, that they want to be part of whatever is going on.

And then Tony Stark doesn’t die and she stops Hammer and she’s in Russia and Barton is _compromised_ and it’s all she can do to let SHIELD work, to not head to the collapsed facility and beg the voles in the ground to give her information, to get her Clint back.

* * *

He is blue-eyed on the walkway, an animal more than a person. His moves aren’t telegraphed, but she knows him, and he speaks in a language she’s never heard before. She understands it, but it’s old and it chills her blood.

He tells her what to do, how to save him, without saying a word. She hits him. Again and again. And when her name slips from between his lips, she hears the plea. The desire, the cure. And she hits him again.

* * *

The Chitauri come, with their space whales and their flying sleds, and Natasha can understand them just fine. It takes nothing for her to hear their voices, to pick up their weapons and turn them around, bolts of blue energy firing faster than any gun she's ever held.

She apologizes to the creature she sinks her knives into, and he whispers his truths with his dying breath, the green sky of his home and the dangerous secret of Thanos. Natasha shivers, but she uses his body to guide her to the apex of the Tower, falling expertly onto the gravel.

* * *

Clint shakes apart in the bathroom of a motel in Muncy, Indiana. The cockroaches sing their song under the cabinet, and Natasha pets his hair as he vomits messily, purging Loki from his body.

"I wish I could fly," he says. She imagines him sitting on the edge of the Helicarrier, his feet in the blowing wind, but instead she stands and gets water from the sink.

"Rinse out your mouth," she tells him, pretending not to see the frustrated tears on his cheeks.

He does, and hands the cup back to her, spitting the water into the toilet with his vomit.

"Stand up," she says, reaching over to flush the mess away, and he does, his knees shaking slightly. She steps into his personal space, keeping his eyes. She can hear him, she thinks, even when he doesn't speak. As real and as loud as any other animal, as anything that sings its nighttime songs in a concrete bunker, as clearly as a harpy eagle perched on his bow.

He is wounded, and he needs to fly.

She takes his left hand in her right, and strikes the position that would begin the foxtrot.

"And slow," she breathes. "Quick-quick."

He laughs. The Feather Step.

She pulls him into the bedroom, leaving the vomit-sweet stench of the bathroom behind, their bodies twirling in the tiny space in front of the cold TV.

_And slow, quick-quick. And slow, quick-quick. And slow, quick-quick._

They have a rhythm, like fucking or flying, and she thinks it's as soothing for her as it is for him.

"We dance the best foxtrot," he says, and the laughter is starting to come back to his voice, the wound starting to scab. It will be a long, long time before it heals, before he even starts to be the same man he was. If he ever does. "Better than most professionals."

Natasha smiles at him, the tiny room feeling huge around her as she turns in his arms, his smile ghosting across his lips.

"Of course we do."

**Author's Note:**

> The "animal harm" warning is for a specific moment wherein Natasha kills a cat-- I don't think it's overly graphic, but if that kind of thing upsets you, please be forewarned.


End file.
